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by Shatema Threadcraft (Author)
In 1973, the year the women's movement won an important symbolic victory with Roe v. Wade, reports surfaced that twelve-year-old Minnie Lee Relf and her fourteen-year-old sister Mary Alice, the daughters of black Alabama farm hands, had been sterilized without their or their parents' knowledge or consent. Just as women's ability to control reproduction moved to the forefront of the feminist movement, the Relf sisters' plight stood as a reminder of the ways in which the movement's accomplishments had diverged sharply along racial lines. Thousands of forced sterilizations were performed on black women during this period, convincing activists in the Black Power, civil rights, and women's movements that they needed to address, pointedly, the racial injustices surrounding equal access to reproductive labor and intimate life in America. As horrific as the Relf tragedy was, it fit easily within a set of critical events within black women's sexual and reproductive history in America, which black feminists argue began with coerced reproduction and enforced child neglect in the period of enslavement.
Shatema Threadcraft is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Her research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, and the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity.
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